Am I a redundant human being? A question asked by many a novel—many a novelist—but rarely so explicitly, and not usually on the front cover. But that’s the title of Mela Hartwig’s novella, written in 1931 and now reissued by Dalkey Press, and it works like a life buoy, alerting us to a writer drowning in obscurity. Born in Vienna in 1893, Hartwig was an actress before becoming a writer; she married Dr. Robert Spira, an art historian and critic, and when the Anschluss came, the couple escaped to London, where they befriended Virginia Woolf. That much the publisher tells you; it’s difficult to find more. There was another early novel with an equally provocative title, Das Weib ist ein Nichts (The Woman Is a Nothing), which became a scandal (and almost a Greta Garbo movie). And I was pleased to unearth an issue of the Association of Jewish Refugees newsletter reporting Mela’s seventieth birthday, a short paragraph sprinkled with poignant information (“When she came to this country in 1938 she encountered insurmountable difficulties in carrying on her activities as a writer. This frustration caused her to find another outlet for her artistic inclinations, which was independent of her German mother tongue: painting”). The next reference in the same organ is her 1967 obituary. In the English-speaking universe she seems to exist mainly in the blinding contrails of Woolf, who used her influence to help release Dr. Spira from a brief internment on the Isle of Man, and came again to the couple’s aid when some paintings Robert had brought from Vienna were judged to be fakes (Woolf promised to get Sir Kenneth Clark, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, to take a look at them). We have a footnote: a cache of letters between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West was recently discovered in a hidden drawer in Sissinghurst, one of which was found to mention Mela in passing, a stray ball lobbed between two pros, long lost in the high grass. Was Mela grateful to be the object of Virginia’s well-connected generosity? Or did she feel patronized, pained by the status gap between them? Friend or frenemy? You’d expect a little volatility from the woman who opened a novel this way:
I’m a secretary. I have nearly twelve years of experience. My shorthand is first rate and I’m an excellent typist. I don’t mention it to brag. I just want to show that I amount to something . . . This is the story that I want to write. Though, it’s so laughably mundane, so incontestably banal, that it’s really no story at all.
The story, such as it is, is an oppressive, monologic rant, not dissimilar to those of Hartwig’s compatriot Thomas Bernhard: the sort of writing that seems dictated from a Viennese chaise longue, though without any hope of therapeutic closure. Never mind Anna O.; meet Aloisia Schmidt: self-hater, compulsive masturbator, narcissistic manic-depressive, all-round good-time gal:
I’m neither pretty nor ugly. My face is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither attractive nor unattractive. It’s a face you simply don’t see. It goes without saying that I wish I were beautiful. That’s hardly a confession worth making. However, I swear that sometimes I want to be ugly too—revoltingly ugly. Of course, I can’t explain why I want to be revoltingly ugly. Perhaps it’s because people would at least notice me then.
At first the comparison with Bernhard is depressing: why do male writers channel rage into sadism while their female counterparts collapse into masochism? After hearing of Aloisia’s unhappy and furious childhood (“I don’t mean to make myself sound any more neurotic than I already have—who am I to have neuroses anyway?—but I have to admit that even as a child I suffered when someone didn’t pay attention to me”), the reader peeks fearfully through her fingers as Aloisia reaches adulthood and men enter the scene:
I think, in fact, that this was what impressed me most about Emil K.: the fact that I only understood half of what he was saying, most of the time . . . I couldn’t understand why an intelligent person like him would stoop to associate with someone like me. It wouldn’t always be enough for him that I had a pretty face. If he was sticking around, it could only be because he still hadn’t found me out.
Aloisia is an accomplished self-saboteur (“I think I have a special talent for seeing the failure I deserve behind every success I might have stumbled into: I had every reason to be content, but wasn’t”) who even in her retelling of events doubts her ability to do precisely that. The sentence “I don’t know if I’m making myself clear”—usually following a paragraph of perfect clarity—keeps coming back, like a stutter.
In an online review, someone called Kate calls Hartwig a “Viennese Carrie Bradshaw from Hell.” It’s a smart comparison, although I think Kate means to condemn her and I’m more inclined to praise. While struggling along with Aloisia—by turns delighted and infuriated, as I once felt watching Carrie—it occurred to me that people consistently misunderstand the logic of these feminine narratives, wherein what looks like self-abasement is very often an inverse form of self-display and self-assertion. That it should be so often mistaken is not surprising: every effort is made to make the self-abasement as persuasive as possible. Think of medieval mystics offering to rip holes in their chests so that Jesus might enter, or present-day comediennes and columnists tearing strips off themselves—death by a thousand self-deprecations. And yet don’t they all, as Orwell put it—describing the “sheer egoism” of writers—“live their own lives to the end”? Doesn’t Carrie always do, in the end, exactly what she pleases?
So why write it otherwise? Perhaps because there is no clear feminine language for triumph, no “bragging rights,” no external symbols that bespeak luck and power. We can’t, as the saying goes, pull it out and slap it on the table. The male narrative ego has never lacked avatars—from the labors of Hercules to the complaints of Portnoy—but female egos, for so long without access to mainstream narrative avenues, seem to have compensated by charting strange and indirect side roads. Heroic tales that don’t sound heroic. Self-performance that looks like self-obliteration. But egos we do have. We want, and we get. It’s simply a devious sort of wanting, always changing, adapting to circumstance—or, better put—always apparently reacting. For example, sometimes Aloisia tells us she is “neither pretty nor ugly”; sometimes she claims she is repulsive; at other times she appears to consider herself the very picture of fabulousness. It’s never an established fact in her mind. It depends upon whom she’s reacting to—
Of course I knew that being near me excited him. I didn’t doubt that he found my face and perhaps my body uncommonly appealing. And I even agreed on this point. I also believed my face and body were worthy of being admired; back then I was convinced (because he was convinced) that I was extremely pretty.
—or does it? Women like Aloisia tend to draw from their more conscious sisters a well-worn critique: these women exist only in relation to men! Who are they, without men? Aren’t they redundant human beings? But then you look closer at these “men,” and a slightly different story emerges. Aloisia’s men are like Carrie’s, they come and go interchangeably and never really shift her from her course; they prove to be paper-thin, ciphers. They are caught in an overheated performance of female self-realization that invents not only itself but also the men to whom it is supposedly reacting. Whether it’s masochism or sadism is less interesting than its overt egotism.
Hartwig knows all this:
It’s hubris, Luise, to think so little of yourself. Do you really think that people—including me—aren’t all sometimes or often or maybe even always dissatisfied with themselves in some way? Do you really think that people—including me—ever really manage to get through life without finding a way to balance their gifts and their pride? That people can ever avoid being humbled by the world and finally accepting themselves as they are? But you’re acting as if you’ve been singled out.
That’s Aloisia’s first love, Emil K., calling her out on what today we might call “her bullshit.” He spells it out in a way even Carrie could understand: “You’re obviously only happy when you’re unhappy.” And that’s what makes this book intriguing, despite its sometimes clumsy phrasing and Freudian posturing: it’s not simply an expression of feminine “hysteria” but an arch critique of it, from the inside. It recasts its much-trumpeted “redundancy” as a vital kind of agency, for it is Aloisia’s self-obsession that powers and determines everything. I don’t think this makes her, or Carrie, particularly admirable, but it does explain the pleasure their narrative arcs provide. Power trips are pleasurable. And what power! Not for a moment are we permitted to withdraw from Aloisia; not only is she not redundant, but other people can only hope for significance in terms of their relation to her, real or imagined. She invents entire relationships with men who are barely aware of her existence. She breaks the hearts of men who adore her by insisting they don’t. From behind a curtain she watches the woman she most admires be rejected by the man she most wants; later the woman shoots herself and the man despairs. And Aloisia herself? Well, despite that title, as the story closes she seems to be the only one left standing:
I’m still employed at the construction firm. I’m known for my first-rate shorthand and my excellent typing skills . . . One colleague, an accountant, has pursued me quite eagerly, and has even proposed marriage. I don’t mention it to brag. I only bring it up to show that there are still people who think better of me than I think of myself. If I were a man, I certainly wouldn’t find myself desirable.
Reader, don’t you believe it.
• • •
Given her difficulties with the opposite sex, I wonder whether Aloisia wouldn’t prefer to be a silverfish? You see, the male silverfish leaves a sperm packet hanging from a silk thread attached to a twig, which the female picks up later with her genital opening. After she’s drained the packet, she eats it. Zero emotional fallout. This I learned from Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love and Language from the Insect World, by Marlene Zuk, a book that has given me almost more insect anecdotes than I know what to do with. At dinner, they don’t just end the conversation, they end dinner. It is a powerful feeling: I recommend it. Whatever the person sitting opposite thinks he knows about insects, after reading this book I guarantee you will know more. He will say, “Oh, sure, some wasps inject their cockroach prey with a paralyzing poison which allows them to drag the roach back to the wasp nest and keeps it fresh.” You will sigh and look down at the butter dish. You will inform your friend—not without humility—that there exists a jewel wasp who rather than using simple paralysis injects the roach with “a judicious sting inside [its] head, so that its nervous system, and legs, still function well enough to allow it to walk on its own.” Then the wasp leads the roach to its doom, effectively “hijack[ing its] free will.” Zombie-cockroach! And PS: if you ever see a silent male cricket failing to attract any females, it’s not because he’s shy, it’s because a fly has, at some earlier point, deposited some tiny larvae on him, and one or more of the resulting maggots have gone into his body, eaten him from the inside, grown as big as the cricket itself, and now live inside him. Zombie-cricket-fly! Game, set, match: you.
But there is much more to this book than the opportunity to lord it over your acquaintances. It’s a chance to look at the way genes behave, free from the wishful thinking, cultural assumption and ideological prejudice we sometimes bring to the study of our own species. What gives insects the edge here is the great variety of their genomes—“A monkey is a lot more like a mouse than a grasshopper is like a flea”—and their profoundly alien ways, which makes it more difficult for us to anthropomorphize them, though we do give it our best shot, as we’ll see.
There is a trend, in the arts and social sciences, to affect a sort of disdain for the “naivety” of purely genetic explanations of behavior. We are, finally, animals of culture, the argument goes, and the idea that genes can be point-for-point attached to human behavioral characteristics is a category error. In a sense, Zuk comes to a similar conclusion, but for her, the argument that genes can’t be “associated de novo with a single trait and that trait only” is not an anti-science argument; it’s a more nuanced reading of the science. For genes associated with one behavior are also associated with myriad other behaviors, as well as continually differing in expression depending on environmental factors such as nutrition and chemical manipulation. She demonstrates with honeybees. The dogma used to be that honeybees were made, not born, via the consumption of royal jelly. In fact it’s not just what you eat, it’s also the way you’re born—but more importantly, it’s the interaction between these two factors: “In honeybees, different nutrients interact with the genome to switch some developmental pathways on and off.” Having the queen gene makes a larva more likely to become a queen but doesn’t guarantee it: honeybees are “exquisitely sensitive to small changes in their environment.” Pumping CO2 into a chamber of virgin queens and workers for ten minutes creates immediate differences in gene expression; ovary development is increased in the queens and suppressed in the workers. Even when the genes are the same (queens and workers share at least two thousand genes), they express themselves differently in the brains of the two kinds of individuals. The picture is, Zuk argues, “both more complex and more genetically determined.” In some ways it’s a messy, unsatisfying picture: so much of our genetic material turns out to be redundant, non-functioning, left over from earlier incarnations. We, like the insects, are walking junkyards of our own evolutionary pasts.
But in another sense, the picture is more richly colored than we ever could have imagined, with our hermeneutic tendency to interpret phenotype evidence in genotype black and white. Take the bees (again). Zuk manages generally to be cheerful about our ignorance of insect biology, but she also has a limit, and that limit is Bee Movie, in which Jerry Seinfeld plays a male honeybee. “There are errors and errors,” she complains, “poetic license versus jarring ineptitude.” It is not much comfort to her that Aristotle made a similar assumption about the gender of bees, and so did Ben Franklin and the nineteenth-century poet Charles Stuart Calverley (“When, his thighs with sweetness laden,/ From the meadow comes the bee”). It’s a predictable error: the big bee, served by everyone in the hive, surely had to be the “king” bee, and the ones lying about doing nothing had to be female, and the ones with the ability to sting, again, must be male. But then why were the males doing all the childcare? That part perplexed Aristotle to such a degree that he “eventually concluded that bees might have the organs of both sexes in a single individual.” Zuk’s point is that by making these assumptions not only do you get a skewed version of the insect world’s sex roles, you further distort the roles in your own world. Also, you simply “miss out on stuff.” In the insect world, fiction has nothing on the truth. How wild that (male) drones are born of unfertilized eggs, thus making sisters more closely related to each other than to their mothers!
Interesting that almost all the anthropomorphic errors Zuk recounts in this book are gender-related. She has fun talking us through “army ants,” also female, whom generations cast as blood-lusting masculine warriors: what’s really going on, Zuk counters, is extreme predation, “and predation is not waging war, it is acquiring food.” Less like marauders on the rampage, more like a crowd of mums tearing through Whole Foods. But there I go, anthropomorphizing. It’s hard not to. And isn’t the title an invitation to apply insect lessons to human life? Maybe we can explore our connections without smothering our differences: “[B]ecause we shared a common ancestor with insects so long ago, we can use them as a way to explore how we arrive at similar-seeming destinations with such radically different modes of transportation.” I kept this in mind as I read of infanticide among beetles:
Its documented occurrence in insects somehow didn’t seem relevant to people, perhaps because we don’t automatically see ourselves mirrored in their behavior . . . [N]ow it is clear that at least some of the time it is probably adaptive in nature, because rearing young when life is harsh, or at the expense of the parents’ well-being, may be too big a gamble for it to be continued . . . If the going gets tough, the tough—and the smart—stop taking care of their children.
Zuk doesn’t make this analogy, but my thoughts turned to those “witch” children of West Africa, murdered by their families. When you have ten mouths to feed and food for only four, maybe the folk tale is not the cause but the cover. How else can the human animal explain to itself its most brutal survival choices?
Given that Zuk’s subject is so inherently engaging, it’s a shame about all the lame scientist jokes made in the name, I suppose, of “popularization.” When, in the 1600s, Jan Swammerdam, a Dutch microscopist, cuts open a “king” bee to prove it’s female, we get this: “‘Hey, did you hear? Ol’ Jan Swammerdam is cutting open a bee next Tuesday! Who knows what peculiar structures he will reveal! Let’s go watch—I’ll buy the mead.’ Do you suppose he sold tickets?” There’re also a few strange attempts at “relevance.” When telling us of the extraordinary ability of bees to “learn to recognize individual human faces,” Zuk goes off on a flight of “war on terror” fancy: “I was seized by the image of a chamber with a bee at airport security, for instance, scrutinizing the faces of passengers to look for matches with photos of known terrorists. Whether this would work better than some of the current efforts is an interesting question.” Professor, you had me at “sperm packet.”
There is such a thing as the flightless blister beetle; it is found in the sand dunes of the southwestern United States. They lay their eggs on a plant called the milk vetch, which it happens they can’t survive on. Instead they parasitize a single species of bee that also lives in the desert. Now get this: the newly hatched larvae, hundreds of them, gather together on the tip of a plant. Viewed collectively they look like the female version of that bee I just mentioned; they even emit something that smells like her sex pheromone. So the male bee comes along and mistakes this pulsing fake for his mate; before he gets wise, a few opportunistic larvae jump on his back. Later, when he finds his real mate, the larvae transfer on to her, and subsequently to her nest, and grow there, feeding off her stash of pollen and nectar. Why am I telling you this? Because it reminds me of the life cycle in Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, by Sigrid Nunez. Sontag must have had a hell of a lot of nectar; so many people continue to grow fat on it. What is the relationship between blister beetles and bees? Friends? Frenemies? Nunez walks that line in a cruel, stylish belles-lettres style that is only ever vulgar in its sentiments, never in the sentences themselves. You sense she wants you to morally judge what she’s done here, and that all her defenses are already prepared—but that feels like an exhausting way to approach this book, a sprung trap laid by a needy author. No, what’s interesting is how alien a sight we seem to find a female intellectual, poking and prodding her with rumor and curiosity—even after she’s died—as if she were a fat king bee of whose gender we’re never quite sure. Did she ever cook? Did she never clean? Was she maternal at all? Was she attracted to men and women equally? Did she treat them differently? Did she dye her hair? Did she watch her weight? Was she vain? Did she truly have no sense of humor? Was she really sleeping with her son? (This, the shabbiest of rumors, repeated by Nunez, is an example of the vulgarity of which I spoke.) Poor Susan. We all have our faults, but not everyone gets pinned and mounted like a bug to a board and held up for all to see.
Feel Free, Zadie Smith
